10 Computer Mishaps

Ant writes "ZDNet UK posted Ontrack Data Recovery's 2004 list of the 10 strangest and funniest computer mishaps... Some of them are funny!" My best mishap was installing the alpha video driver on an NT 3.51 box thinking that it was just an alpha driver. Of course since this Alpha meant DEC and this was an x86 box, the server barfed pretty hard. Also the time I spilled an 8oz glass of water on my laptop and lost all my email from 1994 to 1999 and my backup was corrupted. That I liked too.

Comments

Re:#1 Works!

[EasyComputer]

Once, when I was working IT at a university, we happened upon some extra monitors, old computers sitting at the top of the staircase. Oh wait, actually I wasn't working, I was just stoned and bored and my friend was crazy and it was 2 am. So we were walking around campus and we find all this computer stuff at the top of the library, and to get there you have to go up about 20 flights of stairs that keep circling and if you look down there is a open space in the center, so when we got to the top foor and saw those monitors and saw the huge drop down to the ground floor, our THC induced genius could not resist, we started dropping the monitors, computers, harddrives, trying to get them to reach all the way down without hitting the sides of the stairs, so we've thrown a few down and we hear this sound like someone opening a door, we've already thrown a monitor over and we notice a girl right in the spot where all the stuff is landing...and shattering into a million pieces. So we just look at each other "OH SHIT!" and by some miracle, she realizes that there is something wrong when there are splintered monitors and circuit boards strewn about, so she looks up and jumps out of the way just in time. Then we ran away like crazy monkeys. The End.

Re:My ones

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

I wouldn't be surprised if the board treated that oher jumper as another 2.7 and 2.7 fried the chip.

AMDs will fry easier than Intels in many cases. See the Tom's Hardware Guide story about heatsink failures:

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20010917/

Quick summary:

INTEL P3: Crash, but survive
INTEL P4: CPU throttles down and then back up when the heatsink is replaced

The 2 AMD chips both went up in smoke, one destroying the motherboard in the process.

Re:Arguments becoming options

[Snar Bloot]

I once knew a guy who tried to drive his bike (at night time ) in between , what he thought were two other approaching bikes from the opposite direction.

turns out , they were headlights of a 18 wheeler, who would have thunk ? Now there's an example of a catastrophically badly designed headlight system for a 18 wheeler

I think that's definately "user error", not necessarily any proof of design error. Possibly on the part of the truck driver, but certainly on the part of the bike rider.